A very ingenious new kind of high-tech scam has been going down in China, where clever thieves are returning fake iPhone components to Apple and claiming they're broken official parts, receiving genuine Apple-made pieces in return. And making a nice profit in the process.

The scam, reported by TechWeb, sees people involved in the mobile selling industry taking advantage of Apple's faulty goods return system. The quoted case features a retailer who returned 121 fake iPhone 4S internal boards to Apple for replacement last year. Apple then issued genuine replacements, before discovering, a month later, that the returned parts were in fact fakes.

The police got involved, leading to store engineers and other staff members being accused of working on the fake scam and numerous arrests. Presumably they assumed Apple is so rich it'd just chuck all the broken bits in a bin and not bother checking. [Tech in Asia via The Register]